A blog about making, teaching, and loving dance, written by witness-participant, Catherine Cabeen.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Ready, Aim...

Ready, Aim…is a
solo work that I created for On the Boards NW New Works Festival 2012.I expected this piece to be an excerpt of the
larger piece, Fire!, which I am
creating for 2013, however what emerged feels more like underpinnings for the
evening-length work, rather than an excerpt.

I was inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting
Paintings.In this body of work Saint
Phalle covered surfaces with objects including plastic bags of colored paint
and plastered over the objects to create a voluptuous white surface.Then in increasingly public performances, she
would shoot the paintings with a rifle causing the bags of paint to bleed onto
the painting’s surface.

I am fascinated by the fact that visual artists create work
outside of themselves; while dancer/choreographers are often inseparable
from our work.Because of this I felt it
was important to imagine what it was like to be one of the shooting paintings
as well as the femme fatal shooter.So I
proposed to On the Boards that I make a piece in which I invite the audience to
throw things at me…Be careful what you
ask for, you might just get it.

I feel that our bodies are very much like the shooting
paintings in that we all bury memories in our flesh.Our muscles and joints hold scars quietly
until a touch, or smell, or flavor wakes up the memory and we find our selves
reacting to a situation irrationally, in a way that is more about our personal
history, rather than the actual present.

My intention was to create movement phrases based on
injuries that my body holds, which would be initiated by the impact of the
objects the audience threw at me.While
I was digging into my injuries for movement seeds however, two things
happened.One was that a long-standing
chronic knee injury eclipsed all of the other investigations and actually
became so aggravated that I was no longer able to dance.The other was that while on tour I caught an
episode of Comedy Central’s “Laugh at My Pain.”Watching the stand up comedians I was struck
by their amazing physicality and the fact that by making comedy out of tragedy
they were offering themselves, and their audience a way to heal from their
pain.

My work is not usually very funny.But there is nothing I love more than a
challenge.

photo by Tim Summers

My knee injury is rooted in early ballet training in which I
was told that I shouldn’t have such a big butt and to tuck it under.In my desire to be a dancer, I believed my
teacher and set a posture pattern in place that caused strain on the front of
my hips that led to compromised health in my knees.I was 22 years old before a physical
therapist (named Rocky) told me that I was in fact supposed to have a curve in
my lower back. Physical habits die
hard, and the undoing of this conditioning is still (12 years later) something I
have to be conscious of.This early
training, that to be a dancer I should have no butt, also lead to a long
struggle with eating disorders.

As I investigated the other injuries I have had, I began to
realize that most of them are the result of nutritional and emotional
imbalance, all of which can be traced back to self sabotage that I enacted in
order to fit into my perception of what I was supposed to look like as a woman,
and certainly as a female dancer.

One reason I create work inspired by historic artists is to
analyze the relationship between art and culture, both what has changed and
what has remained the same. Saint Phalle was cruelly objectified and not taken seriously
as a woman artist in the 1960s.While
the waves of feminism continue to beat on the shore of misogyny, we still live
in a culture that does not provide equal pay for equal work, expectations are
extremely different for boys and girls, and women’s work is often reduced to
how they look doing it.

In dance, misogyny is so inherent in classical aesthetics
that it is almost invisible. *The
history of ballet costumes is about the increasing reveal of women’s legs and
point shoes make women unable to stand on their own resulting in the
continuous, literal manipulation of women by men in classical dance.That’s what we expect when we go to the
ballet.Even Martha Graham, with her
incredible cast of female heroines also established a theatrical aesthetic in
which thick make-up and pounds of fake hair have become an essential component
of the female character’s strength.As a
dancer in the Bill T Jones/ Arnie Zane Dance Company I was valued for what made
me masculine; broad shoulders, height, and I had a shaved head when I joined
the company.I am a tomboy, but it was
confusing from age 19-28 to be told in so many ways by my mentor that I would
be more valuable if I were a man.

I’ve been creating my own work for many years, wrestling
with my love of classical lines, technical virtuosity, and feminism.I believe that as an artist I have a responsibility
to make work that actively participates in creating the kind of cultural
dialogue I want to live in.My love of
beauty and my desire to be an activist often feel as though they are in
conflict.Ready, Aim… was born out of that tension.

Dance is an incredible language to speak about the amorphous,
dynamic, multi-faceted experience of being human.But there are some subjects better addressed
directly.The pain in my knee enforced a
monologue rather than a movement study, but as soon as I opened my mouth I
realized how much I had to say.I
thought that being a target would be painful, but instead it fed my fire.I thank all of the audiences for their active
involvement.

Someone asked me if I “wrote” Ready, Aim… I didn’t.I
uncovered it.What makes it funny is
that it’s so true.

1 comment:

Yes, Catherine. I resonate with so many of the ideas and feelings you express above. Feelings that get kept within the flesh only to be activated by a sense, usually when we least expect it. Being a human being first, but due to a love a beauty, falling into the paradigm of what it means to be a beautiful woman. These are all topics that need more fleshing out. It seems to me, you are doing this process of fleshing out in the textual sense, but also in the physical sense. Keep on it! This is essential uncovering.

About Catherine Cabeen

Catherine Cabeen, MFA, is an artist and teacher. Cabeen is the Artistic Director of Catherine Cabeen - Hyphen, a performance company that was founded in 2009 as a forum for creating dynamic, interdisciplinary performances that engage the body as the intersection for ideas.
Cabeen has received choreographic commissions from On the Boards, Donald Byrd’s Spectrum Dance Theater, TWU, the Visa2Dance Festival in Dar Es Salaam, the International Dance Day Festival in Byblos, Lebanon, Pig Iron Theater Company, and the Cabiri, among others.
The New York Times has called Cabeen’s Hyphen, “highly kinetic, complex... visually exquisite,” and “beautifully performed.” The New York Times, May 13, 2011.
Cabeen is a former member of the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company (1997-2005), and the Martha Graham Dance Company, among others.
She currently performs in her own work, and with Richard Move. Cabeen is also an Assistant Professor at Marymount Manhattan College and a regisseur for the Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company.
For more information see catherinecabeen.com